The first time I met Billy Goodrich he was sitting on a wooden bench in Sligo Creek Park, rolling a huge spliff with the care and precision of an artisan. This was in the fall of my junior year, and my first semester at Blair High in Silver Spring. My grandfather had used a Maryland relative’s address to get me in, alarmed as he was at my subpar sophomore performance in the D.C. public school system.
Billy yelled, “Hey, Greek,” and I did a double take, surprised that one of the more popular students even knew who I was. “Come on over here and help me out with this number,” he said.
We split the joint (the handshake of my generation) and then laughed awhile over nothing. After that we played one-on-one at the park courts for the rest of the afternoon and our friendship, with the uncluttered reasoning that accompanies those years, was sealed.
Billy Goodrich was one of the better-liked kids in school, though not for the usual reasons. He wasn’t the best-looking or most athletic guy; neither was he the friendly intellectual who even the most brutal students grudgingly learn to respect. What he had was that rare ability to fit in at the fringe of every group-hippies, grits, geeks, jocks-without conforming to their constrictively rigid codes of behavior and dress. He did it with an infectious smile and a load of self-confidence that bordered on, but never slipped into, conceit. As I had always hung with Jews and Italians and other Greeks, he was also the first truly white-bread friend I had ever had.
The details of those years are unimportant and certainly not unusual. Billy had a ’69 Camaro (the last year that car made any difference) with a 327 under the hood and Hi-Jackers in the rear. There was a Pioneer eight-track mounted under the AM radio and two Superthruster speakers on the rear panel. On weekend nights we drank Schlitz from cans and raced that car up and down University Boulevard and Colesville Road, trolling for girls and parties. On the nights when we got too drunk the cops would pull us over and, in those days, simply tell us to get on home. Our friends enacted roughly the same ritual, and amazingly none of us died.
I had part-time work as a stock boy, but on the days I had off, Billy and I shot hoops. Every Saturday afternoon we’d blow a monster joint, then head down to Candy Cane City in Rock Creek Park and engage in pickup games for hours on end. The teams always ended s oup being “salt and pepper,” and the losers did push-ups. Billy had a cheap portable eight-track player, and on those rare occasions when we’d win, he would blast J Geils’s “Serve You Right to Suffer” over the bobbing heads of the losing team. Eventually our overconfidence (and the desire to unearth the wet treasures that simmered beneath the red panties of our Blazer cheerleading squad) pushed us to try out for the varsity team, but Billy didn’t have the heart and I, in truth, lacked the ability. The day we were cut we walked the path in the park and, with laughter and some degree of relief, split a bumper of beer and huffed half a pack of Marlboros.
After graduation Billy, who had already been accepted to an out-of-state school, took a construction job, and I continued to work as a stock boy at Nutty Nathan’s on Connecticut Avenue. The prospect of another humid season carrying air conditioners up and down stairs was upon me, so when a customer I had befriended offered me the opportunity to tow his ski boat down to the Keys for two hundred bucks, I accepted. Billy’s construction job was kicking his ass so he asked to come along. I secured a leave of absence from Nathan’s with the help of my friend and mentor Johnny McGinnes; Billy simply quit. We made plans to stay in D.C. through the Fourth of July and leave the following day.
The summer of ’76 was not just the tail end of my childhood, a fact of which even then I was vaguely aware, but also the end of an optimistic era for an entire generation. The innocence of marijuana had not yet, to use the most emblematic example, become the horror of cocaine, and the economic and political emergence of minorities hadn’t yet been crushed by the moral bankruptcy of the Reagan years. But our Bicentennial celebration reflected none of this, and what I witnessed on Independence Night was simply the most spectacular party ever thrown in downtown D.C.
The next day Billy and I prepared to leave. We attached a hitch to his car (mine, a ’64 Valiant with push-button transmission on the dash, never would have made it), changed his oil, and filled up the tape box. The tapes we were to return to most were Lou Reed’s Sally Can’t Dance (I can’t hear “Kill Your Sons” now without the druggy heat of that summer burning through my memory), Robin Trower’s Twice Removed from Yesterday, Bowie’s Station to Station, Hendrix’s mind-blowing Axis: Bold as Love, and the debut from Bad Company. We cut the black BAD CO. logo off that tape’s carton and glued it, facing out, on the Camaro’s windshield, to let any doubters know just who we were. There was also the odd business of a plastic grenade hung from the rearview, and a new bumper sticker that read MOTT THE HOOPLE: TELL CHUCK BERRY THE NEWS. For recreation we had copped, from Johnny McGinnes, an ounce of Mexican, a vial filled to the lid with black beauties, and half a dozen tabs of purple haze; there were also several packs of Marlboros scattered on the dash. We were eighteen years old and certain that the world’s balls were in our young hands.
And so we took off. We put together four hundred dollars between us, and our plan was to travel around the South until the money ran out. Billy picked me up, and my grandfather stood and watched us from the front of our apartment house, tight-lipped and with his hands dug deep into his pockets, until we were out of sight. His shoulders were hunched up, and he grew smaller in the rearview as we headed down the block.
A half hour later we had secured the Larson on thewerarson o hitch of the Camaro and said good-bye to the surprisingly trusting owner of the boat. We stopped once more for a cold six-pack, got on the Capital Beltway, and headed for 95 South.
That night we pulled into Virginia Beach and crashed at the place of a friend who was working in a pizza parlor for the season. In the grand tradition of resort employee living quarters, there were several burnouts staying in his two-room flat, where pot was always lit and the TV and stereo were always competing in loud unison. Since there were no cooking facilities, I can only guess that these guys ate pizza the entire summer. The decor consisted of a fisherman’s net tacked to the wall (during our stay someone had hung a dead sea bass in its webbing) and a bright green carpet, which was stained alternately with puke and bong water. The next day we swam and then in the early evening Billy and I each ate a tab of purple haze and bought tickets to the B. B. King show at the local civic auditorium. We arrived and found we were the youngest and most sloppily dressed in the mostly black crowd of oldish fans, some of whom were sweating through their three-piece suits and evening dresses in the liquid heat. I began to get off on the acid during a tune where Mr. King sang, with his hands off Lucille and one fist clenched, “I asked my baby for a nickel / She gave me a fifty-dollar bill / I asked my baby for a sip of whiskey / She gave me the whole gotdamn still.” Billy and I smoked joints for the rest of the show to notch us down, and the folks around us were all quite happy to join in. I kept a log on that trip, in which I critiqued B. B. King’s performance in the following manner: he had “turned that shit out.” Afterward a bespectacled guy wearing khaki shorts and a pith helmet accompanied us as we wandered from one late-night establishment to the next, fluorescently lit cafes that were indistinguishable in that they glowed and buzzed with identical intensity. We lost our friend sometime before dawn and ended up on the beach for what I thought was the most blazingly orange sunrise I had ever seen. Billy was sleeping by then, with his face in the sand, and I watched his body twitch as a deerfly continually had its way with his leg. I never once thought to brush it away.
We slept that morning and, after stopping to say goodbye to our host (he was scarfing down a slice of pizza as he waved us off), headed south. The drive lasted into the evening and ended when we pulled into a motel called the Pennsylvania on Twenty-first Street in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We hung out on the beach and swam the next two days in the piss-warm wavelets of the Atlantic. On the second night we felt rejuvenated enough to party and returned to it with a vengeance. By the time we got to the Spanish Galleon, the resort’s most popular nightclub, which was packed with raucous innocents (in a way that only Southern bars can be), Billy and I were raped on beer and tequila and determined to score. We had by now developed a contest involving the number of women we could rack up on the trip (Billy dubbed it our “cock test”), and I immediately crossed a busy concrete dance floor where college kids were doing the shag to Chairman of the Board’s “Give Me Just a Little More Time,” and proceeded to slip my tongue into the mouth of a hideous but willing biker queen who had been standing by herself. From out of the corner of my eye I could see Billy laughing as I rolled my tongue in her cankerous orifice, and now, with spiteful determination, I led her out to the beach for the long walk down to the surf where I “made love” to her near the breakers. After I came in her doughy box her face changed from the merely ugly to the truly frightening, and when she demanded that I “fuck” her again, I obeyed, her oily black hair buried in the sand by my dutiful thrusts. Somehow I lost her in the Go ther in alleon and hitched to the motel, where an unrelenting Billy was waiting for me with an evil grin. For the next three days he teased me about the clap (and every time I urinated I could hear his laughter outside the bathroom door), but miraculously it didn’t surface, and the next morning, my head pounding and down in disgust, we left Myrtle and continued south.
Our next stop was Charleston, the Jewel of the South, which at first glance promised to be a genteel blend of white-gloved belles and dripping cypress. We planned to visit Billy’s friend Dan Ballenger, who for reasons I can’t recall was nicknamed and preferred to be called Pooter. Pooter was an amiable squid who lived off base in a decaying suburb of the city. Pooter’s cottage was small and not even air-conditioned with window shakers, so there was little else to do in that oppressive heat but lie around on his sticky green vinyl furniture and do bong hits while watching the Summer Olympics. This was the year the young man from Palmer Park took the gold medal in boxing, and I cannot remember anytime being quite so proud to carry the label of Washingtonian. On the second night of our stay Pooter took us to a shotgun shack of a bar on the edge of town where aggressively plain girls were employed to wear negligees and con the customers into buying them seven-dollar wine coolers. One of them, an emaciated, pimply little teenager, sat on my lap and then got pissed when I refused to step up for the drink. By now Pooter was nervous, as there were several sinewy, long-haired types scattered around the place who looked more than happy to dispatch wiseasses such as us. Billy made a point of finding the owner and telling him what a “classy place” he had, and that was when we all decided it was time to go. In the car Billy and I ate two more tabs of haze and drove to a Piggly Wiggly, where we stole a watermelon from the outdoor rack and, as a startlingly quick clerk chased us on foot, peeled out of the parking lot and into the thick night. The watermelon was as warm as the air and we dumped it after a disappointing taste. Then we found a movie theater and bought tickets to The Out-law Josie Wales. After Joseph Bottoms’s wonderfully acted death scene-“I was prouder than a game rooster to have ridden with ye, Josie”-I remember very little, since the acid kicked in and I focused, for the remainder of the film, on the colorful, dust-filled tubes of light that traveled from the projector to the screen. When the film ended we drove to the Battery, which seemed to be the only spot in Charleston that carried a breeze, and got high, and talked with a young man named Spit who claimed he didn’t care for “ofay motherfuckers” but had no problem with smoking their weed. The whole time we were doing this, Pooter slept (I still don’t know how) in the backseat of the Camaro, his head back between the Superthruster speakers that were now blowing thirty distorted watts of Hendrix out across the intracoastal waterway. We slept that whole next day and, at six in the evening, said good-bye to a rather relieved-looking Pooter.
Soon after we hit the highway we agreed that we needed to clear our heads. Each of us swallowed a black beauty and then, as that cranial tingle began, we pulled over in Columbia and bought two large bottles of burgundy. After Columbia the speed tore in, and from then on it was all cigarettes, wine, open windows, and maximum volume (we blew one of the speakers that night, during Earl Slick’s screaming guitar solo on Bowie’s “Stay”). In Augusta we stopped for more wine, were thrown out of a rock-and-roll club for something Billy said to the doorman, then wandered into an all-black disco and danced with an amphetaminic frenzy until 3:00 A.M. (I was fairly proficient then in a jerky, popular dance called the Robot.) I drove the resat rove tht of the night, nervously picking at my thumb the entire way, which resulted in a good bit of blood on my hand by the time we reached our destination. We pulled into Atlanta at 6:30 in the morning.
The first hotel we saw was on Houston Street, and it was there, a ten-dollar-a-night wino flophouse, that we took a room. We only stayed in Atlanta a couple of days, finding it in general to be neither friendly nor safe, though I did get a date on the first night with a young, green-eyed strawberry blonde, a hawker for one of the clubs in the Underground. She had no intention of sleeping with me-she was too smart for that-but we enjoyed a quiet, air-conditioned evening together in her apartment, where she lent me the use of her blessedly clean shower. I think I reminded her of her brother from whatever small midwestern town she had mistakenly fled. The next day a junkie tried to pay Billy and me to pick up his “pharmaceutical” prescription for Quaaludes, and we came very close to doing it. We decided then to think about leaving, as our part of town was clearly no place for a couple of Yankee white boys, and of course there was the matter of the expensive boat parked in the lot behind the hotel. That night I sat almost naked in the window box of our room (the only spot that wasn’t hellish), smoking cigarettes and thinking about home, while Billy stretched out in a bathtub filled with cold water. We left the next morning.
The trip to Key West was sickeningly hot and seemed to take the better part of two days. Once there, we dropped the boat off quickly to some middle-aged hippie and collected our two hundred dollars. We walked around the town but, our spirits drained, found its surreal trappings not to our mutual taste. There was a fully clothed, sun-blistered young man lying in the middle of Truman Street with pennies stuck in his eyes. That is what I remember of Key West.
An hour north on A1-A we smoked a huge, celebratory joint, which had me peaking just as we rolled onto the old Seven Mile Bridge and gave me the most panicky few minutes I have spent on any stretch of road. Liberated from the boat, Billy’s Camaro seemed to be mounted on mattress springs rather than shocks, and it was all I could do to keep the goddamn vehicle from becoming airborne as other similarly drugged and sailing individuals sped toward us, missing collision by what seemed like inches. When we got off the bridge we were both ready for a beer or two, and we stopped in Marathon at what looked to be a peaceful dive called Dave’s Dockside. Never having experienced the novelty of a twenty-four-hour bar, Billy and I began a long, boozy evening in which we lost all but fifty dollars of our payoff money shooting pool. The whole thing ended around dawn when a pirate type (yes, wearing a black eye patch) took a swing at me for talking to his girlfriend. He was too drunk to connect, but suddenly our former friends all looked like bad-assed, raw-knuckled locals, and we walked out to the car and pointed it north.
After another day of hot, conversationless travel, we stopped in Daytona, for no reason other than to satisfy Billy’s desire to drive his car on the beach. We checked in to a cheap motel and spent a sleepless night knocking biting, armored cockroaches the size of thumbs off our beds. After breakfast the following morning we were totally broke. We walked around and asked about work but understandably got no takers, as we were beginning to look like every other K-head biker in town. That night Billy, on sheer charm, picked up an Italian girl and got both a life-affirming blow job and a clean, cool place to sleep, while I settled for the spine-wrenching backseat of the Camaro. (For the rest of the trip Billy did not stop describif mtop desng the determined look on the poor girl’s face as she attempted to swallow, as he put it, “a month’s worth of jizz.”) The following day we halfheartedly tried to find a job in the one-hundred-and-two-degree heat, but by now we both knew it was over. Sometime after noon we simultaneously fell asleep or passed out on the sidewalk in front of a major hotel and were awakened two hours later by the cops, who threatened to book us for vagrancy unless we left town. We agreed but drove only a few blocks down the road, since at this point we had not even enough money for gas. At dinnertime I created a diversion in a convenience store by breaking a bottle of orange juice, while Billy grabbed candy bars, nuts, and several Slim Jims, and shoved them into his jeans. We ate this bounty seated at some memorial, which (we should have known) turned out to be the favorite cruising spot for Daytona’s homosexuals. One of them, a birdlike boy our age who had the unfortunate, swishy mannerisms that Catskill comedians and conservative politicians so love to exploit, had a seat next to us and offered a small bit of money and a place to sleep if we cared to “indulge.” We both answered with emphatic negatives, but when the kid persisted, Billy winked at me and told me to wait for him at the car. An hour later he returned with a wad of money in his fist and the explanation that he had persuaded the boy to give us a loan. When I asked him, with a smirk on my face, what he had to do to get it, Billy threw me up against the car with an explosion of fury I’d never suspected in him. We drove on and I didn’t mention it again, but after that things were not quite the same between me and Billy.
There is not much to say about the next couple of days except that we found Route 10 and headed west. I do remember the surprisingly green and hilly terrain of northwestern Florida; and of the night we spent in Mobile, I have only the strange recollection of a downtown building painted black.
Sometime early in August we made it to New Orleans. I had Billy blast Robin Trower’s “I Can’t Wait Much Longer” (“I’ll get my coat and catch a train / Make my way to New Orleans”) through the speakers as we rolled into town. We chose to stay in a nine-buck-a-night cottage at a place called the Carmen D Motel on Chef Menteur Highway. The plump, elderly proprietors were rosy-cheeked and friendly, and there were chickens running around in the yard of willowy trees that the cottages surrounded. Billy and I found night work quickly on a movie theater cleaning crew. The manager of the theater was to lock us in at around midnight and let us out in the morning, but this was to last only one night. On that first night we smoked a couple of joints as soon as the owner had split and then decided, to the knowing looks and chuckles of our Mexican coworkers, that scraping chewing gum off the underside of seats just wasn’t our thing. After that we resolved to stop thinking about work and simply enjoy ourselves until the money ran out. There seemed to be bars everywhere in that city, and in the next two weeks we did little more than sleep through the mornings, then spend the humid afternoons shooting pool and drinking Dixie. In one of those bars we met two sisters, older women named Viv and Julliette, who took a liking to us and then proceeded, for eighteen hours straight, to screw us raw in their respective beds. Billy had chosen Julliette (she was the better-looking of the two) but I was secretly happy to go with the redheaded Viv, who was witty and had a throaty laugh and full, buttery breasts. They had a name for that particular summer’s high murder rate down there (I think they called it the Summer of Blood), but I cannot believe there is a place in this country so dedicated as New Orleans to the proposition of having fun. On our last night in town Billy caught one of the chickens inpli chicke the yard, marked his leg with a twist tie, and fed him a hit of purple haze hidden in a piece of popcorn. Then we each had a tab, the end of our supply. Later, in our room, we began to trip our asses off while watching The Wild Bunch on our black-and-white set, howling as we mimicked the classic lines of dialogue, the images becoming progressively amorphic on the small TV screen set against the green wall, the corners of which by now had completely dissolved. On the stoop later, we sat and drank beer, chain-smoking cigarettes while talking about the road ahead. Our lone chicken was out there, traversing the yard in wild circles, wired to the hilt. Billy was distracted by this and remorseful to the point where he suggested we pack up and leave. I don’t think he wanted to see that chicken dead, something that was certainly going to happen before morning. So we gassed up the Camaro, swallowed the remainder of our black beauties, and were out of New Orleans before dawn’s first light. Twenty-four hours and twelve hundred miles later I was in my bed in the back room of my grandfather’s apartment, and that is where I slept for the next two days.
The next week Billy reported to some ACC college in North Carolina, and I began classes at the state university shortly thereafter. We wrote a couple of letters in the fall, and then I saw him over Thanksgiving. The night we went out he was with one of his new fraternity brothers, a guy Billy called Digger Dog, and we went to a local pub where they talked about “brew” and “sport-fucking” and “DG girls” while I faded into my booth seat and got quietly drunk. High school friendships either die or continue in that crucial first semester, and ours simply didn’t make it.
But none of that really matters. There is a photograph of Billy and me, taken by a tourist, that to this day is in an envelope at the bottom of my dresser. In the photograph we are sitting high up on a fire escape near Bourbon Street. Billy’s hand is on my shoulder, and our hair is long and uncombed and past our shoulders, and we are both smoking cigarettes. There is that look on both of our faces, that look that almost shouts that it has all been grand and that it is never, ever going to end.
In everything that I have done since, and everything that I will ever do, there is nothing that will equal the wondrous, immortal summer that I experienced in 1976. Now Billy Goodrich had walked into my bar, fifteen years later, and brought it all back home.